Culture Self-Identity and Politics

The assigned article Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference by Indian postcolonial scholar Akhil Gupta and American critical anthropologist James Ferguson critiques how Anthropologys use of culture has failed to fully explain the politics of cultural differences and their production. Challenging the notion of culture as a fixed, geographically bounded phenomenonsuch as in Geertzs workthey argue that the concept of culture itself shapes imaginaries of space and belonging, a perspective also supported by Soekefeld. In Modules 1 and 2, we debunked the idea that culture alone determines identity within a specific locality. While focusing on the individual is one way to theorize culture, Gupta and Ferguson push us to examine how hierarchies of race, class, and gender are constructed and legitimized through cultural narratives. For instance, Trumps previous and current rhetoric on immigrationframing it as a threat to the purity of American cultureillustrates how ideas around culture (which often correlates with nationhood in political rhetoric) can be deployed to justify exclusion and assert superiority. For this modules assignment, please address the following: Define the cultural critique approach in Anthropology. Explain the following quote using a cultural critique lens: For if one begins with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected, that cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but one of rethinking differences through connection (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 8). Briefly explain how Foucault theorizes power.